


A Future, No Future At All

by musamihi



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 21:31:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Apollo is reckless in his infatuation, and his sister can only do so much to repair his mistakes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Future, No Future At All

**Author's Note:**

  * For [miakun](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=miakun).



> One of the things I love most about the most prominent stories in Greek myth is that there's no definitive version - references in drama and epic poetry are oblique, and the rest of it is left to our imagination. So fleshing out Cassandra's story was great fun, especially considering I had to find a way to fit Artemis in. Hopefully this version of events is in keeping with the logic of the story. Thanks for the awesome prompt, and enjoy. :)

She lay in the courtyard among the snaking roots of the tree, her arm bent across her eyes against the afternoon sun. The day's heat was at its peak. The stiff leaves of the bay were still. The god of the bow ruffled his black crow's feathers, perched upon a branch that stretched nearly to the ground. He was waiting.

She stirred, and let her arm slip to the grass. She blinked up through the branches with eyes glazed with fever; her hair lay around her whitened face in disarray. He spread his wings and drifted to her feet. He saw on her the sheen of madness he held so dear; saw a woman distanced from the world by some weight upon her chest that made her breath come very slowly. She seemed to hear him rustling in the grass and sat up, drawing her legs under herself and regarding him with an unseeing expression. Her lips hung slightly open.

He relaxed into his true form, or the dim copy of it that was human. It took some time for her eyes to follow him up to where he sat beside her now, leaning close; but when she met his gaze he saw that they were beautiful, liquid, wide and slightly wild. He drew so close that on his lips he could feel her breath and the unnatural heat from her skin.

"What's your name?"

She was silent for a moment, struggling to focus on his face. "Cassandra," she said against his smile. It was little more than a whisper.

"And whose are you?" His hand hovered just above the trembling arm that kept her propped up in the grass.

When she allowed her eyes to loosen out of focus again, he knew she had realized who he was. "Priam's daughter."

"You are beautiful." She was practically burning – he felt it everywhere, his fingers gliding through the space above the curve of her ribs, the dip in her abdomen, the swell of her breast and the hollow of her throat, always just short of touching. He felt her shudder. "Would the daughter of a king be the companion of a god?"

Her breath came out in a hot rush. She leaned back, the better to take him in; he followed, his lips the merest fraction of an inch from her skin, breathing in the scent the earth had left in her hair. He could hear her blood speeding through her veins. He loved the sight and sound and smell of the madness working itself to a pitch.

"You'll have the gift of sight," he continued, "The truth that all my servants see. Would it please you, to know beyond what's in a mortal's power?" He pressed his palm gently against the flesh of her thigh, and she gave a jolt. Her blood seemed to flare up against his skin.

"Yes," she said.

Apollo's smile flashed white in the shadow of the tree. "Tomorrow, then." He lifted his hand, and she fell limply to the ground once more, fighting slumber. Madness came from waiting, too. "Sleep, Cassandra." He laid the tips of his fingers on her brow, driving the fever out of her. Her frenzy would arise from his possession, not some plague. Tomorrow. Her body stilled, put at peace. He leaned over and pressed his lips lightly to one of her ears, and then the other – his gift, his promise kept.

As he stretched his wings and flew away, Cassandra's hand twitched, once, as though she had fallen into nightmare.

\- - -

She woke to a wave of dread crashing down on her ribs, and shot upright – in her bed, in the chilled darkness of the room where she and three of her sisters slept. They seemed all to be undisturbed, breathing easily and hidden from the cold under woolen blankets. Cassandra, when she had been stricken awake before by dreams or sickness, had often found her comfort in the sight of them, these sweet faces she knew would have a slow smile for her in the morning. Now they seemed as corpses. She was consumed with the poisonous notion that they would never rise again.

Feeling ill, she slid from her bed, threw on her cloak, and stole into the hall. She ran, barefoot, through the corridors and up a steep staircase to an unused tower she knew would have no sentry. The night was nearly as still as the day had been, but sharply cold all the same. She breathed it in as she mounted the final stair. Stretching out below her was a burning city.

Even as she gasped, the red glow faded into darkness – the vision had passed. She stood, stunned and unmoving, her eyes fixed on the shore where the moon made furrows of shadow in the water. She half expected to see warriors spring up from them, fully armed. She thought of her undefended sisters. A deep pang of secret guilt sounded in her chest – even as a child, she had played at telling their futures, pairing them off with famed suitors of the day or condemning them to a life of scullery and maidenhood – and now, though she saw them cold and still, she did not regret her new powers of Sight. To see frightful things was a burden that felt as though it might prove maddening, but it was not scullery, and it was not maidenhood. She was not to be condemned. She was a woman with a future –

_twined about Athena's ankles like a fig plant, green and young, uprooted effortlessly by the soldier storm, torn from the goddess like so many grapes from a vine, bruised and carried off for another's fruit_

\- with no future at all.

Cassandra shivered, and ducked her chin against her chest. Her end was dark. She desired the gift, and was loath to relinquish it, but knew that futures did not change themselves. _Renounce your power,_ shouted the moral of every story she had ever heard. The gods did not forgive mortals who clung too fast to what shreds of divinity were allowed them.

Her mind made up, she ran again to her courtyard. Rocks, hills and forests were more appropriate to the goddess she meant to invoke, but the walls of Troy were not easy to pass, and she was in no state to try. She fell to her knees, scooped a bit of earth into a tiny mountain, bowed over it until it smeared against her forehead, and sunk her hands as deep into the grass as they would go. Her prayers to the goddess of chastity and maids tasted bitter in her mouth, but she spoke them in as fervent a whisper as she had ever spoken. _Not that end,_ she thought as she searched frantically for any small sacrifice to make. _Not slavery, not servitude, not being counted out with the other spoils of a war._ There were small blue flowers that grew at the root of the bay. She burned a few, tears in her eyes. Their stems crinkled into nothingness before her.

_Artemis, protector goddess, strike down the evil that approaches me, and take me to your breast; I would be a child of the forest before I would belong to some other king._

\- - -

Artemis sat at the mouth of the cave, her back against a bank of moss and her bare feet trailing through the frigid spring. The leaves of all the trees around her were constantly in motion, whispering to her – she heard Cassandra's prayers, quiet though they were, and took her sacrifice to heart, meager as it was. It had been made in necessity, and the protection she asked was at least partially within her power to give. She could not stop slave-taking kings, but she could shield Cassandra from the most immediate evil that would befall her should Apollo realize she had no interest in his further favors. Artemis could save her from a death tomorrow, if not from her more distant misfortunes.

Her twin was wandering nearby, she knew, in something of a state. His blood was high, his smile unfocused, his mind far into the future. When he led himself into a passion of anticipation, there was little anyone could do to drag him out of it. She reached down to splash a little water at him as he passed by; he gave a start, and sank to sit beside her, his arm twining its way around her narrow shoulders.

"Sister." His golden skin was flushed and nearly glowing.

"You shouldn't excite yourself so," she said, choosing not to delay the unpleasant news. She did so love seeing him in a fit of pique. His rages could be truly spectacular. "The woman you desire is no longer yours."

His smile only widened. "Your forest has lied to you," he said, pressing his mouth to her throat. He never seemed to tire of wasting his affections on the most unattainable of men and women. "She's promised herself to me just this afternoon."

"A promise?" Artemis shrugged his arm away, to show what she thought of promises.

"Yes, a promise." He held fast to her. "And I've given her a gift, to show her my good will, and she'll be mine in the morning."

"Well, you've acted rashly," she persisted, resting her elbows on her knees, not in the least surprised. "A gift for a promise is an uncertain exchange at best."

"You haven't seen her, my dear. She wants me – is mad for me."

"She's mad for you no longer. She's asked for my protection, and she has it. She made _me_ a sacrifice, rather more substantial than a promise." Artemis carefully suppressed her smile as her brother's arm fell away from her back. She could feel him stiffen and settle beside her.

"Protection? From what?"

She grinned up at him. "Seeing as she desires neither you nor your gift – I thought protection from you would be most urgently necessary."

He was standing now, gripping the slender branches of a sapling in one hand. His face had darkened; his mouth was set. "She promised herself to me," he said again, so stubbornly that she couldn't help but laugh. Her dear brother, always so blinded by what _should_ be.

"Promises are so much smoke," she said.

He disappeared. She followed.

Cassandra's favored courtyard was silent no more. Artemis watched, hidden among the tree's branches, as Cassandra threw herself at Apollo's feet. He was terrible in his anger, all the power of the sun glaring into the eyes of one adversary. Her begging was, at first, impossible to hear over the sheer force of his displeasure. When she lifted her terrified, tear-stained face to him, he raised his hand to strike her for her lack of gratitude. Artemis felt her anger lashing out from her chest; Apollo howled as his hand fell on Cassandra's cheek, and fell back a step, clutching at his stinging fingers. Artemis smiled. He could not touch the girl.

A flicker of realization passed over Cassandra's face, and she stood – shaking violently and quite reluctant to look him in the eyes, but still, she took herself up off her knees and did not bow. "I beg your forgiveness," she said in a tremulous voice, though her eyes were hardening. She was cooling into pride as he was lighting into passion; Artemis reflected that they were in some ways very much alike. "I cannot," she was saying, steadying with every passing moment. "I cannot – it means a life not my own, in thrall to another king – if it were only you, if I were only to be yours – but – "

"You accept my gift, a power beyond any you ever could hope for," Apollo snarled at her, fury and humiliation in his hunched shoulders and jutting jaw, "And throw it back as if it were nothing. You might have been the consort of a god; you walk away as though I were no one at all. You would treat an immortal as though he were nothing but a common slave - _hubris_ \- "

That made her pale again, yet all the same she held her ground. "I give it back to you," she said, her genuine desire to appease him quite evident. But underneath her earnest words there ran a current of reluctance. "I give it freely – take the gift, I am unworthy of it. Please."

Apollo smiled unkindly. "I cannot," he said, turning his palms to the sky. "I cannot touch you to relieve you of it – my sweet sister has seen to that. It's yours until the day you die. But you will have no joy of it." He spat on the ground at her feet. "No one else will ever have cause to thank you for your Sight. You will see, and you will know, but you will be powerless. Who will believe a mad woman, when her madness comes not from a god but from herself? You will never sway another man, though your words be true. You have broken trust with a god, and you will never gain another's trust again."

Artemis watched as her brother leapt into the night and flew away; she watched as Cassandra's heaving shoulders settled slowly in the moonlight. The woman looked about her, her fear ebbing, and Artemis felt pity for her. How many times had mortals tried to scramble out of the path of an approaching future? Success was impossible. An end once seen was set in stone, not to be moved by any mortal machinations. She had saved Cassandra from her brother's wrath – no small feat – but if the girl thought herself free from the fate that had been spun for her, she would be disappointed. It was a shame. Artemis thought she would have made a worthy partner for Apollo; it was clear they could make each other quite insensible. Such was the downfall of her brother's passion: the men and women he could love were the ones he most wished to wound. Perhaps someday he would understand, and temper himself in time. But the lesson would come too late for Cassandra.

\- - -

Ragged, salt-soaked men ran frantically along the sharply listing decks, clinging to the rigging or the splintering stems of oars as the bow crashed again and again into the sudden caverns of the bedeviled sea. Their king and captain had angered the Earth-Shaker, who now in his fury laid bare the underwater passages to his brother's kingdom. All of them were doomed to a black, cold burial and an aimless eternity in Hades.

All but one. _He_ stood just before the mast, easily balancing as the decks shot up from side to side, unaffected by the frozen waves dashing over the crew. He watched with tranquil pleasure, eyes fixed on the largest man aboard – the king of the Locrians, whose sin was dragging down the ship as surely as a snarled anchor. The king's armor was cast off to the side, for easier swimming; he was shouting at the top of his lungs, terror in his eyes, pale and shaking and largely ignored. A coward. Apollo's smile widened.

Here was another mortal he could not touch – Ajax son of Oileus was claimed for another of his sisters. The man had dragged a suppliant straight out of a temple of Athena though she had been embracing the very feet of the goddess's statue; he had defiled the sanctuary of the temple, and he would pay. Poseidon had condemned him for his hubris, Athena for his scorn. And though the woman he had stolen _ought_ to have belonged to Apollo, she did not – and he could only watch, his heart swelling with a jealous glee as the scoundrel's hour grew nearer.

A white flash of lightning stabbed out of the iron-blue sky and snatched Ajax from his place at the helm. His body soared through the air and landed with a crash beside Apollo, who let out a piercing laugh. The black blood running from the man's nose and ears lifted his spirits somewhat out of their mire of bitterness. He longed to finish him himself, but Ajax was not his.

Apollo crouched down beside him on the rough deck, his knees swimming in brine, and pressed his cheek to the dying man's. His lips brushed close against his ear. "You took a woman who had promised herself to me," he said. "You took her from my sister's house, and you thought to escape her vengeance on the sea. One death is not enough for you – but your end is not in my hands. Be glad my sister is distracted with the _real_ soldiers whose remains lie scattered around Troy. She is normally much more invested in her projects."

The ship gave its final heave. Ajax's body was sent flying; Apollo spread his hawk's wings and let the wind carry him up into the sheeting rain. Ajax landed on the sharp, wind-twisted rocks off the lee. The last gleam of human fear left his eyes, and he was dead. Apollo let out a cry half-mournful and half-triumphant as he flew away – there was nothing of Cassandra he could touch, nothing, not even her avenging. His gift had taken her from him, this woman who had been the first to raise a little madness in him under her own mortal power.


End file.
